Tag Archives: Valdosta

It’s only going to get hotter: time for solar power

Looks like the heat wave is going to continue for a while, according to NOAA’s maximum heat index forecasts. Reuters wrote today,

A heat wave baking the eastern United States in record temperatures is set to continue on Sunday after deadly storms killed at least 12 people, downed power lines from Indiana to Maryland and left more than 3 million customers without power….

Utilities in Ohio, Virginia and Maryland described damage to their power grids as catastrophic.

Laura J. Nelson wrote for the LA Times Friday, As a heat wave rolls across U.S., scientists predict more to come

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Record Georgia temperatures above 100 degrees

Driving north Friday, the temperatures kept getting hotter. John C. Griffin recorded these temperature signs, used here by permission. Friday 29 June 2012:

Record heat wave with triple digits in Macon, Georgia on Riverside Drive at Arkwright Road
Photography by John Griffin (c) 2012 All Rights reserved

I can attest it was still over 100 in Macon after dark Friday.

And it only got worse Saturday 30 June 2012:

Arkwright Road at Riverside Drive – I-75 Exit 169 – Macon, Georgia Record Heat Wave
Photography (c) John Griffin All Rights Reserved

That’s 107 on Friday and 111 Saturday in Macon, where the previous record high for June was 106.

You know, Macon, where Georgia Power is still “studying” and “experimenting” with solar power. Solar power that continues to generate in the heat with no water use. Solar power that Continue reading →

Millions without power due to no smart grid

We know the answer to this! Top story on CNN.com today: Millions without power as storms pound U.S. following record-setting heat

Nearly 4 million homes lost power early Saturday across the Midwest as a fierce line of thunderstorms and winds pounded the region after record-setting temperatures.

The storms moved east from Indiana through Ohio and into West Virginia, according to utility companies. Virginia was hit with power outages to more than 1 million homes.

The outages come as tens of millions in the central and eastern United States are battling a sweltering summer.

Thirty years ago the Internet demonstrated distribution and decentralization is the way to avoid widespread outages. That's what a smart grid would give us. I can say by experience that if many of those homes and businesses had solar panels with batteries, they could weather 10 hours or more of no grid power with no problem. My solar panels and batteries have done that for my house for years. Yours could too, and you could be selling excess power to people and businesses that don't have panels, if Georgia Power would let us change state law to let us.

And hey, with wind power, in a storm you'd have more power!

Temperatures Friday soared past 100 degrees Fahrenheit from Kansas to Washington, with scorching conditions expected to continue through the weekend and beyond.

It was 107 degrees in Macon, Georgia yesterday at 7:30 PM. So what's Georgia Power doing about solar power in Macon? Still studying it, according to Josephine Bennett in NPR a year ago:

Georgia Power's Carol Boatright says for 18 months researchers will collect data and then ask the following questions.

How about this question, Georgia Power and the Southern Company and Oglethorpe Power and all the EMCs: Will you wait until Georgia is without power until you deploy solar power, or get out of the way so we can do it ourselves?

-jsq

 

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Started before scheduled time, unknown potential appointments and budget changes: Video Playlist @ LCC 2012-06-25

Gretchen arrived early, but they started even earlier. That’s right, once again the Lowndes County Commission started a meeting before the advertised time. None of the names of prospective appointees to four different boards were listed in the agenda, and many of them didn’t bother to show up. Nor do we know what’s in the budget amendments.

So we have videos starting in the middle of the appointments.

  • 6.a. Valdosta/Lowndes County Parks and Recreation Authority (VLPRA)
    Nope, they already discussed that before the announced start time, so there’s no video.
  • 6.b. Appointment to Valdosta-Lowndes County Construction Board of Adjustments and Appeals.
    Presumably he stated his name at the beginning of what he said, but that was before the stated meeting start time. And the agenda does not include names of the applicants for appointment to any of the affected boards.
  • 6.c. Keep Lowndes Valdosta Beautiful (KLVB).
    I would like to commend KLVB for listing all its board members and their terms on its own web page.
  • 6.d. Appointments to Lowndes County Library Board.
    If the Library Board has its members listed somewhere online, I can’t find it.
    Nobody showed up to speak. County Manager Joe Pritchard said Edward Rawls and Rabbi Elbaz(?) asked not to be reappointed, and Kay Harris is asking to be reappointed. (They didn’t mention that Harris is also the chairman of the library board and the editor of the VDT.) Names under consideration are [clatter, bang]. It’s impressive the ways Pritchard finds to be unintelligible even with his microphone adjusted correctly.
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Strategies for Lowndes County? —John S. Quarterman

My op-ed in the VDT today. -jsq

Our high schools and college graduates mostly have to go somewhere else, because jobs here are few and many of them don’t pay enough for a decent living. Should we not care enough about our families and our community to come up with strategies that grow existing businesses and attract new ones that will employ local people?

We need discussions and strategies that involve the whole community, going beyond just the usual planning professionals, to include all groups and individuals with information or opinions, whether they got here generations ago or last week: for fairness and for freedom.

Sometimes we see local strategy. Winn Roberson organized Drive Away CCA. Ashley Paulk verified there was no business case for a biomass plant in Lowndes County after many people successfully opposed it. School “unification” opponents, out-financed 10 to 1, still defeated that referendum 4 to 1.

How do we go beyond opposing things and move on to sustainable strategies that build clean industry?

The Industrial Authority focus group meeting I attended Wednesday was refreshing, because their consultants asked the opinions of people some of whom previously had to picket outside. The previous day, VLCIA Chairman Roy Copeland said this strategic planning process was a long time coming. I agree, and while nobody can say what will come of it at this point, I hope it does produce a real Economic Development Strategy.

Building on the Valdosta City Council’s annual consideration of affordable housing,

Continue reading →

TS Debbie and south Georgia extreme drought —Ashley Tye @ LCC 2012-06-25

Lowndes County Emergency Management Agency Director Ashley Tye correctly predicted no tornadoes and quite a bit of rain for when Tropical Storm Debbie made landfall. He also mentioned our chronic drought, and Commissioner Richard Raines was surprised about that.

Raines asked:

What kind of conditions would it take for us, because you and I talked a couple of weeks ago, and I was I was surprised when you said that. I guess there’s a difference between drought and extreme drought. What kind of rain conditions would we need to get out of that, I guess in terms of inches, for the water table….

Tye answered:

For them to officially declare us out of the drought, the latest numbers I’ve seen were about 15 inches over the next 30 days, or over the next 3 months, it would have to be like 25 to 30 inches. So we still need a lot of rain. But every little bit is going to help. With the rain we’ve got recently we’re better off than we were, but we’re still technically classifed as in extreme drought.

Here’s the video:

TS Debbie and south Georgia extreme drought —Ashley Tye
Work Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE), Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 25 June 2012.

Readers of this blog know we were already in drought more than a year ago. According to U.S. Drought Monitor, we’ve been in a protracted extreme drought since then. According to USGS, our groundwater levels are all red, as in extremely low. Extremely low as in at historically low levels, as in they’ve hardly ever, if ever, been this low.

-jsq

Olive Garden struggling to revive sales

Apparently there's trouble at Breadsticks. Candice Choi and Tom Murphy wrote for AP today, Darden's Olive Garden strains for a turnaround,

Darden Restaurants Inc. is struggling to revive sales at its flagship Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants. A key sales figure fell at the chains during the latest quarter, and the company issued a profit forecast that fell short of Wall Street expectations.

The Orlando, Fla.-based restaurant operator has been reworking the menu and pricing to reverse declining sales at Olive Garden, which is its biggest chain and accounts for almost half its revenue. The 10 percent rise in Darden's net income for the quarter came primarily from the opening of new locations, including those for its smaller specialty chains.

Hm, so they're trying to turn around by opening new restaurants. Yep:

Based on the long-term prospects for its brands, however, the company plans to accelerate growth in its fiscal 2013, with about 100 net new restaurants. The company had 89 more restaurants at the end of the quarter than it did a year earlier.

By the way, you can make the breadsticks yourself.

-jsq

Some transparent planning in buffalo

Donn Esmonde wrote for Buffalo News 24 June 2012, Big shots listening to community,

The times, they are a-changin'. The Millard Fillmore-Gates story is further evidence. The days when power brokers decided what was best behind closed boardroom doors, then tried to shove it down the community's throat, are mercifully ending. Break out the champagne.

The fallout from years of stalled projects and misfired magic bullets, and the emergence of more-enlightened power brokers, has adjusted boardroom attitudes. The altered mindset is —from the waterfront, to a reviving downtown, to whatever happens with Millard Fillmore Hospital —paving a path to happier endings, with less drama and fewer hard feelings. I think we could get used to this.

Faced with the eventuality of a massive, empty hospital bordering a prime neighborhood, Kaleida scheduled public forums and called in the cavalry of the renowned Urban Land Institute. What once was unthinkable in corporate boardrooms now is becoming reflexive.

“We learned from other examples that had not gone well…that we needed to involve the community, be transparent and collaborate,” said Kaleida's Ted Walsh. “All of that will help us to reach a better decision.”

The old boys actually listening to the community pays off! Hey, we could try that! Actually, VLCIA maybe has, with its strategic planning process. We shall see.

-jsq

Dublin ahead of us again: solar street lights

Dublin, Georgia already got MAGE Solar and car part manufacturer Erdrich Umformtechnik. Now Dublin is ahead of us again, with solar street lights.

Austin Lewis wrote for 13WMAZ yesterday, Dublin Sets Up Solar Street Lights,

Dublin has started putting up Solar street lights on South Jefferson near the city's downtown. This project got federal funding from the federal government administered by the Georgia's Department of Transportation.

And grant supported! If anybody around here had applied, maybe we would have gotten such a grant.

Instead, it's another first for Dublin:

"This is the first transportation corridor that has solar lighting in the state of Georgia so it's just very exciting for us, first to have a solar industry in Dublin, now to have the first state roadway lit by solar lighting," said Tim Lake, of T. Lake Environmental Design.

Bragging rights and practical, too:

Lake said the cost of these street lights is about $11,000 and that the standard street lights cost just over $7,600. But the typical street light have other costs like a leasing fee and monthly energy costs that go to the electric company.

He said because the solar street lights are powered by the sun, they will end up saving taxpayers about $500 dollars a month or $15 per street lamp.

"The first is return on investment happens very quickly, 3.7 months for the city to get a return on investment on these lamps," said Lake.

All that plus this:

The solar panels were also made in Dublin by MAGE Solar. Lake said this was a truly collaborative project.

Collaboration. Maybe our Industrial Authority should try it.

-jsq